Requiem for a Monster

Kanye West was once a Sacred Monster, and he knew it.

Kanye West, dapper during his 808’s & Heartbreak era, 2008.

It’s a frigid February afternoon in 2016 and I cut class to attend a listening party at Madison Square Garden for the latest album by Kanye West. 

The excitement is palpable as the arena fills up with fans and gawkers. Men and women of all ages and backgrounds speculate on what the record would sound like; it follows 2013’s Yeezus, his radical collaboration with super producer Rick Rubin. 

While the album unveiled this day – The Life of Pablo – receives high marks, and has some fantastic songs on it (I text an old flame, an indie musician, the link to “Fade” with the note: “[Your band] needs to cover this ASAP”,) it ends his mind-boggling, 12 year streak of instant classic albums. As my friend and I break it down afterwards, we conclude, he’ll be back next time.

It’s February 2022, I’m in Paris, and I’ve just had dinner with the man I broke up with a few days prior. He asks me what I’ve done in the days past. I tell him that, among other things, I’ve watched the first part of a documentary on Netflix about Kanye West called jeen-yuhs. His downward spiral has been accelerating for years now, and is a few months from irredeemable implosion. I tear up while I tell him how sad it is to see such an icon fall; I tell him why this person is such a genius; I tell him about how important his music is in the landscape of American art, American sound. He shrugs and says, “I think you’re being a bit emotional over this.”

From his debut in the early years of the 2000’s until his most dramatic crash and burn in the late 2010’s, nobody embodied the term “Sacred Monster” more than the artist and producer Kanye West. Universally acknowledged as such, it was common to hear (or utter) the phrase: “Kanye West is a genius – the only problem is, he knows it.” 

It is indisputable that the first dozen-odd years of West’s career are, in fact, genius. His music from this time was, and is, transcendent, innovative, and so incredibly influential that we take for granted how impactful it was to the landscape of music and fashion. He was unabashedly himself, to the extreme – he didn’t (and, evidently, still does not) listen to the advice or opinions of others, investing heavily in himself and his creative vision. 

An easy way to tell if someone is at the vanguard of their craft is to gauge the reaction to their work. Does it feel out of place? Bizarre? Uncomfortable? Those who are truly at the cutting edge of culture are usually maligned for being wildly out of place. It is only when culture catches up with them that they are celebrated for their forward-thinking creativity. This is something that was common to observe with Kanye West, almost every single time he did anything in public, be it releasing a song, album, video, performance, what he wore, et cetera. Just when you thought you could predict the Kanye West “sound,” he would change it, radically. He was brilliant.